The present invention relates to food products and to their methods of preparation. More particularly, the present invention relates to improved methods of preparing puffed snack products prepared from cooked cereal.
Parent application U.S. Ser. No. 09/025,976 is directed principally towards ready-to-eat cereal products especially in flake form that are characterized in part by a preferred visual appearance imparted by being fabricated from cooked cereal doughs having discernable grain pieces dispersed therethrough. These cooked cereal doughs are prepared by cooking under extended times but with low shear in cooker extruders involving a first short cook step and a second long cook step. However, in one embodiment, improved cooked cereal doughs are taught that are similarly prepared with sequenced short and long cook steps each with low shear that are suitable for use in the provision of snack products prepared from cooked cereal doughs. The present invention provides further improvements in the methods of preparing such cooked cereal doughs for the preparation of snack products especially fried puffed corn (maize) based snack products.
More particularly, the present invention is directed towards improved methods for preparing open ended shaped corn based fried snack products popularly marketed worldwide under the Bugles(trademark) trademark.
Traditionally, such products are prepared by preparing a cooked cereal dough, forming the cooked cereal dough into pellets or half products of desired shape size and moisture content, and the fat frying the half products to form the finished puffed corn based snack products. Preparing the cooked cereal dough involved cooking the cereal grain material in the presence of moisture for extended times under conditions of low shear in a single vessel operated in a batch cooking mode. While useful, such grain cooking apparatus and techniques require specially designed and fabricated cookers.
Substituting twin screw extruders for such costly and specialized cereal cookers can reduce the cost of preparing the snack products and provide other advantages. Twin screw cooker extruders are economically desirable due to their high output and short residence or cooking times, and continuous operations features. However, twin screw extruders can undesirably impart high amounts of shear into the cooked cereal dough undesirably affecting the eating qualities of the finished snack products produced from such cooked cereal doughs.
The extruder""s screw configuration and operating conditions can be selected to minimize the amount of shear imparted to the cereal dough. For example, the extruder can be configured to minimize the amount of time within the extruder and thus to some extent the amount of shear experienced. However, low shear and short extruder residence times can in turn lead to a problem of xe2x80x9cwhite tipsxe2x80x9d within the cereal dough. White tips are small visually unappealing white spots within the cooked cereal dough, which have been incompletely cooked or dispersed within the cereal dough.
One attempt at solving the problem of white tips in cooker extruder prepared whole wheat containing cooked cereal doughs is given in U.S. Pat. No. 4,790,996 entitled xe2x80x9cProcess For Preparing Cereal Productsxe2x80x9d (issued Dec. 13, 1988 to Roush; et al.). The ""996 patent teaches adding a hollow pipe to the discharge end of a cooker extruder to cook the dough more by virtue of an extended residence time thereby reducing white tips.
The present improvements reside in part in the steeping of the cereal grains under particular conditions and thereafter forming into a cooked cereal dough in a cooker extruder. The dough is next subjected to a second cooking step within a second, low shear extended residence time cooker. The cooked cereal dough is then extruded and processed by a particular sequence of steps under particular conditions. The dough is formed into desirably sized and shaped pieces or half products. The half products can be deep fat fried or otherwise finish dried and puffed to form finished corn based snack products.